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Recent scholars of the professions have argued that a new hybrid form of professionalism is becoming dominant. This new form combines traditional commitments to ethics and community service with new commitments to managerial and entrepreneurial objectives. We analyze the perceptions of 4,300 U.S. graduate students in 21 fields concerning how well their programs have prepared them for leadership and management and for ethics and community service. These assessments allow us to examine the prevalence of this new conception of professionalism and to examine it in relation to two other conceptions: the “neo-classical” emphasis on ethics and community service as opposed to leadership and management, and another that emphasizes a divergence between business and technical professions on one side and social and cultural professions on the other. Hybridization was comparatively rare but occurred more frequently among students preparing for management, law, and medicine, and among men and students from more affluent families. We also find some support for the neo-classical thesis insofar as students tended to score higher on the ethics and community measure than on the leadership and management measure. However, the largest number of students took positions consistent with the divergence thesis.

For U.S. research universities, cluster hiring has become a popular means to add faculty members in university-defined priority fields. The expectation of advocates is that these faculty members will collaborate on high-impact research. Utilizing a national sample of 168 cluster-hire faculty members from eight U.S. research universities, we find statistically significant gains in research output, collaborations, and research impact from pre- to post-hire. However, these gains are not distributed equally. Some output and impact measures show greater gains for white and Asian researchers relative to under-represented minorities and for men relative to women. Significant gains in research output are associated with fields like advanced materials and health sciences for which generous external support is available. Significant research impact is associated with researchers located in wealthy, prestigious universities. The findings indicate that cluster hiring is no cure-all for fields that are disadvantaged in the competition for external funding or for non-elite universities that are disadvantaged in the competition for prestige.

Extending and expanding Geiger and Feller’s (1995) analysis of increasing dispersion in R&D expenditures during the 1980s, the paper analyzes publication and citation counts as well as R&D expenditures for 194 top producers using Web of Science data. We find high and stable levels of inequality in the 1990s and 2000s, combined with robust growth both in the system and on individual campuses, considerable opportunities for short-range mobility and very limited opportunities for long-range mobility. Initial investments in research, private control, and the capacity of wealthy institutions to attract productive faculty are associated with high levels of scientific output. New entrants to the system and those that leave the system are both clustered near the bottom of the hierarchy.

This paper assesses the causes and consequences of recent American efforts to configure the research university as an engine of economic and social change. Drawing upon interviews and strategic plans, the paper describes recent policies to encourage ‘interdisciplinary creativity’, in a context of increasing income from private gifts and endowments.